It is useful for website operators to be able to discern patterns of visitation to their websites. Website operators, advertisers, and other parties are interested in finding out which web pages within their websites tend to be visited more or less frequently than others. Such information has many uses, including for example: identifying problem areas in a website, pages that tend to lose visitors to other websites, traffic flow for advertising and server load purposes, and the like.
Of particular use are statistics describing the visitation path flow that visitors tend to follow. Such statistics include for example, information describing where the visitors tend to enter the site, what pages do they tend to visit first, what pages tend to be visited just after or before other pages, and the like.
Existing web analytics software generally provides some statistics as to site visitation path flow. In general, such techniques include presentation of static reports describing the percentage of visitors that follow particular path flows.
What is needed is a dynamic display that would allow a user to traverse a chosen path flow and to see what web pages tend to be visited before and after any page along the path flow. What is further needed is a user interface for providing such a dynamic path flow display in an easy-to-use and intuitive manner. What is further needed is a system for generating printed website visitation reports based on the dynamic path flow display.